Lullaby - Softcover

'Terrifying and haunting, Lullaby is every parent's worst nightmare. You won't read a smarter, more chilling book this year. It's wonderful.' (Mel McGrath, author of Give Me The Child)

'Consistently spellbinding: a supremely confident and provocative novel that deserves similar success to Gillian Flynn's bestseller.' (Alex Peake-Tomkinson TLS)

A masterpiece: a brilliant exploration of the collision of race, gender, and class wrapped up in a gripping psychological thriller. I absolutely loved it - and read it in one sitting. (Amy Chua, New York Times bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)

A nanny wields such emotional power, despite a sometimes appalling lack of rights or status or future. ..It's an explosive cocktail, and Leïla Slimani's deft, often agonising novel shakes it up with a precision that takes your breath away.
The acid, throwaway beauty of so many of Slimani's descriptions and phrases [means] that you are taken deep into a fragile, damaged yet somehow rationally irrational psyche. I closed this book feeling very shaken but also with a sense that I'd just had an experience that almost no other art form could have given me. Long live the novel.

(Julie Myerson Observer Book of the Day)

'A taut and exquisitely written novel that will keep you up all night desperately turning the pages. This book is insanely good.' (Kate Hamer)

'Through sparse, striking prose, Slimani shucks her character's skins and shows us their messy inner workings. LULLABY is a deeply disturbing, compulsive read that manages to make the monstrous pitiable, the inhuman humane.' (Kiran Millwood Hargrave, bestselling author of The Girl of Ink and Stars)

'Slimani's agonisingly addictive novel, translated from French, is set in bourgeois Paris where the helping hand that rocks the cradle masks an insidious psychosis feeding on a working mother's guilt and the silence of her dependent infants.' (Laura Bailey VOGUE)

'Anyone who has ever had to hire someone to look after their children in their own home knows that it is unlike any other working arrangement...Leïla Slimani's brilliantly executed insight is that there is great emotional jeopardy for everyone involved.

It would have been easy, and narratively effective, for Slimani to build a picture of a psychopath; it's clear, in the kind of mythic language she uses and from the occasional slightly overdone gothic touch, that she was tempted. She achieves the far more interesting feat, however, of playing entirely valid points of view against each other, sometimes in consecutive sentences: one minute we are seeing things from Louise's point of view; in the next her face is blank and we are outside again, with the parents. Rather like childhood, Slimani's novel arrives at its inevitable climax through an accretion of seeming banalities and mundane pressures.This is a political book about emotional work, about women and children and their costs and losses. But, partly because Slimani looks so clearly at these losses, not only giving them their due, but placing them carefully for full narrative impact, Lullaby also works as a thriller, which is quite a balancing act to pull off.'

(Aida Edemariam Guardian)

'There's always something slightly uncomfortable about books that rip their plots from the headlines, a sense that we are thoughtlessly delving into someone else's private anguish. Thankfully Leïla Slimani's Prix Goncourt-winning Lullaby, which takes its inspiration from a real-life case in New York in 2012, manages to rise above these unpromising beginnings to tell a taut tale of poverty and privilege, motherhood and work, marital tensions and unequal relationships, all underpinned by the terrible question: what could lead someone to murder two children?

Slimani has a keen eye for the small ways in which nannies are slighted and ignored and is smart too about the way in which we celebrate the notion of the perfect mother while condemning those, such as Myriam, who refuse to sublimate themselves in their children's desires.

Ultimately Lullaby's haunting power comes from the fact that Slimani emphasises with her adult characters while refusing to let any of them off the hook: they are all in some way complicit in Mila and Adam's terrible deaths. As an examination of what happens when privilege, power and poverty intersect so personally it is hard to beat.'

(Sarah Hughes i Newspaper)

'Slimani has identified a vital subject: the challenge all working parents face in handing the care of their small children to strangers.' (David Sexton Evening Standard)

Leila Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. Her first novel, The Ogre's Garden - forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2019 - won the Prix La Mamounia. Slimani is a journalist and frequent commentator on women's and human rights. She lives in Paris with her husband and two children. Sam Taylor is the translator of HHhH by Laurent Binet and You Will Not Have my Hatred by Antoine Leiris.